I follow some of the writings of Nassim Taleb. I came to the conclusion that RISC-V will "succeed" because there's no way for it to fail. It's like Linux.
I don't think licensing fees to ARM are a problem per se, it's the "frictional costs" that it introduces. My understanding is that the Raspberry Pi developed their RP2040 because ARM had a reasonable package available for its low-end Cortex-M processors, which doesn't apply to their higher-end Cortex ones.
RISC-V doesn't even have these restrictions. Even extremely small outfits can play around with RISC-V designs. Most of them won't go very far, but with enough lottery tickets, one of them is bound to draw the winning numbers.
Sure there are considerable obstacles. I toy with microcontrollers. For hobbyists like me, ARM processors are still the most sensible choice. I'm not expecting any shift from that for at least five years. But who knows after that? Anything can happen.
I don't think licensing fees to ARM are a problem per se, it's the "frictional costs" that it introduces. My understanding is that the Raspberry Pi developed their RP2040 because ARM had a reasonable package available for its low-end Cortex-M processors, which doesn't apply to their higher-end Cortex ones.
RISC-V doesn't even have these restrictions. Even extremely small outfits can play around with RISC-V designs. Most of them won't go very far, but with enough lottery tickets, one of them is bound to draw the winning numbers.
Sure there are considerable obstacles. I toy with microcontrollers. For hobbyists like me, ARM processors are still the most sensible choice. I'm not expecting any shift from that for at least five years. But who knows after that? Anything can happen.